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I rode up to Twin Peaks this afternoon, after going through Land's End, out to Ocean Beach and down the path that parallels the Great Highway. It was one of those days when I feel so lucky to live here.
The view above is from Twin Peaks Boulevard--I love how the Transamerica pyramid and the new One Rincon Hill bookend the downtown skyline. And if you look carefully, you can see the Ferry Building gleaming at the end of Market Street.
What conditions best support learning and personal growth?
1. "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education"
We can find some answers to this question in the work of Judy Willis, a former neurologist who obtained her teaching credential after a 15-year career in medicine and now teaches at Santa Barbara Middle School and blogs at Psychology Today. [1,2,3] In "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education" Willis brings both disciplines to bear on the task of creating an optimal learning environment:
My own experience as a neurologist and classroom teacher has shown me the benefits of joy in the classroom. Neuroimaging studies and measurement of brain chemical transmitters reveal that students' comfort level can influence information transmission and storage in the brain. When students are engaged and motivated and feel minimal stress, information flows freely through the affective filter in the amygdala and they achieve higher levels of cognition, make connections, and experience "aha" moments. Such learning comes not from quiet classrooms and directed lectures, but from classrooms with an atmosphere of exuberant discovery (Kohn, 2004). [4]
"An atmosphere of exuberant discovery" aptly describes my most fulfilling experiences as a learner, and my aim as a teacher and coach is to evoke that feeling in others. Willis continues:
[Neuroscience] research suggests that superior learning takes place when classroom experiences are enjoyable and relevant to students' lives, interests, and experiences... [In contrast, neurological] scans demonstrate that under stressful conditions information is blocked from entering the brain's areas of higher cognitive memory consolidation and storage. In other words, when stress activates the brain's affective filters, information flow to the higher cognitive networks is limited and the learning process grinds to a halt. [5]
In short, stress can inhibit learning--and yet so many learning environments are needlessly stressful. I'm reminded of Hans Selye's concept of eustress and the resulting awareness that some level of stress supports optimal performance, and beyond this level performance declines. [6]
Willis reminds us to pay attention to this curve so we don't push ourselves (or others) beyond the point where learning diminishes. To convey what this looks like in practice, Willis discusses what she calls the "ideal emotional atmosphere" of an environment optimized for learning--a concept that's had a profound influence on my approach to teaching:
It is crucial that educators use classroom strategies that reflect what we know about the brain and learning. So how can teachers create environments where anxiety is low while providing enough challenge and novelty for suitable brain stimulation?
Make it relevant.
When stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students. Teachers can reduce this type of stress by making the lesson more personally interesting and motivating. Ideally, students should be able to answer the question, "Why are we learning about this?" at any point in a lesson...Create positive associations.
Eliminating all stress from students' lives is impossible. However, even if previous classroom experiences have led to associations that link certain activities...to a stress response from the amygdala, students can benefit from revisiting the activity without something negative happening. By avoiding stressful practices like calling on students who have not raised their hands, teachers can dampen the stress association...Allow independent discovery learning.
Thanks to dopamine release and the consolidation of relational memories, students are more likely to remember and understand what they learn if they find it compelling or have a part in figuring it out for themselves. In addition, when students have some choices in the way they will study or report on something, their motivation will increase and stress will diminish. They will be more accepting of their errors, motivated to try again, and less self-conscious about asking questions. [7]
Whenever we're helping people learn--in a classroom, a workshop, or a coaching conversation--we can feel tempted to tell, to advise, to provide answers. My experience as a coach has taught me the importance of resisting this temptation, and Willis's final point above helps to explain the neurological basis for this dynamic. Our brains are wired to learn more effectively when we figure things out for ourselves. There's a connection here to the value of experiential learning and its emphasis on the "perceptual order" of our direct experience rather than the "conceptual order" stressed in most learning, as William James wrote over a century ago. [8] This isn't to say that we should never tell or advise or provide answers--but when we take those shortcuts we should be mindful of their potential to undermine learning.
2. Joyful Learning and the SCARF Model
Willis's perspective on "joyful education" brings to mind executive coach David Rock's SCARF Model, which describes how our brains respond to social threats and rewards. [9] Rock's acronym stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness, five domains of social experience within which we regularly encounter threats and rewards that trigger responses in the brain similar to those triggered by physical threats (such as pain and hunger) and physical rewards (such as relief and satiation). Rock notes:
Much of our motivation driving social behavior is governed by an overarching organizing principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward...[and] several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks used for primary survival needs. In other words, social needs are treated in much the same way in the brain as the need for food and water. [10]
And a consequence of the psychological principle that "bad is stronger than good" is that we move away from perceived threats more forcefully than we move toward potential rewards. [11] So in optimal learning environments we should take care to avoid triggering threat responses.
With Willis's work on "emotional atmosphere" in mind, we can envision aspects of stressful learning environments that might trigger a sense of social threat: Authoritarian teachers and intimidating leaders who diminish others' status. Unclear lessons and irrelevant exercises that fail to provide clarity on learning goals. Excessive structure and a lack of choice that rob learners of their autonomy. A heightened power distance preventing teachers or leaders from developing a sense of connection and relatedness with others. And favoritism or arbitrary rules that undermine fairness.
Rock's model describes a set of neurological dynamics at work in every social setting, but Willis makes clear their vital importance in learning environments. Whenever we're seeking to promote learning, it's essential that we structure the environment to minimize social threats and cultivate an "atmosphere of exuberant discovery" by promoting social rewards.
As teachers and leaders, we need to take advantage of every opportunity to raise the status of those around us. We need to provide sufficient certainty without stifling creativity, and we need to provide sufficient autonomy without leaving others feeling lost or alone. We need to foster a feeling of connection and relatedness among the diverse members of a group. And we must always be fair.
3. Safety, Trust, Intimacy and Learning
Finally, Willis's work reminds me of my own belief in the importance of safety, trust and intimacy in any learning environment. As I've written previously:
The foundational qualities that define every group are the levels of safety, trust and intimacy: Safety = A belief that we won't get hurt. Trust = We mean what we say and we say what we mean. Intimacy = A willingness to make the private public.
When safety, trust and intimacy are established, these qualities support the actions that lead to greater success as a group: experimentation, risk-taking and a willingness to be vulnerable.
When we feel able to experiment, take risks and make ourselves vulnerable, our ability to learn, to increase our self-awareness (and our awareness of others) and to change our behavior in order to achieve our goals more effectively increases dramatically. [12]
Footnotes
[1] Thank you to mediator and attorney Stephanie West Allen for directing me to the work of Judy Willis: The Neuroscience of Joyful Education (Stephanie West Allen, 2010)
[2] Radical Teaching, Psychology Today (Judy Willis)
[3] R.A.D. Teach (Judy Willis)
[4,5,7] The Neuroscience of Joyful Education (Judy Willis, Educational Leadership, 2007)
[6] The Nature of Stress (Hans Selye, 1982)
[8] William James on Experiential Learning
[9] Neuroscience, Leadership and David Rock's SCARF Model
[10] SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others (David Rock, NeuroLeadership Journal 2008)
[11] Bad Is Stronger Than Good (Roy Bauermeister, Catrin Finkenauer, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D. Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001)
Revised March 2019.
Photo by Phineas H.
Next month marks the first anniversary of the publication of my Self-Coaching Guides, six compilations of posts on the topics of Communication, Leadership, Motivation, Change, Learning and Happiness.
The Guides have been well-received--hey, they're currently in the top 10 when you search for "self coaching"--and I'm glad people have found them useful. That said, they're due for an update, and there's plenty of room for improvement--a project I'm planning to tackle this Summer. The main changes I hope to make include:
If you have any feedback on how the Guides could be made more useful, please take a look and let me know--I'd be grateful for your input.
A final thought: ALL coaching is ultimately "self-coaching." No matter how closely I work with my clients and students, and no matter what useful insights may emerge during our sessions, they do the heavy lifting of understanding themselves, tapping into their strengths, and, when necessary, changing their behavior on their own.
Photo by Theresa Thompson. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Today was an astoundingly beautiful day in San Francisco, and I spent a portion of it on one of my favorite rides around the City, a route that winds for just over 13 miles through Golden Gate Park, the Panhandle, the Wiggle, the Duboce Bikeway (above), Market Street, the Embarcadero, Fort Mason, Crissy Field, and the Presidio before returning to the Richmond.
I've ridden through the Duboce Bikeway literally thousands of times--I worked in downtown SF for a total of 8 years, and I commuted by bike for most of that time--but not once have I ever stopped to take a photo of the mural there, even though it happens to be my favorite piece of public art evah.
But for some reason today I stopped and snapped the pic above. And looking at it now I want to ride out to Ocean Beach immediately.
